Operation Eggs Over Easy - The CIA's Shocking Role In The Birth Of Pub Rock

CIA chief Richard "Uncle Dick" Helms testifies before closed congressional hearing, 1972

Having been pivotal in the late 'sixties Youth Movement through the manufacture and supply of Hoffmann-grade LSD, the CIA soon turned its beady eye to the UK.

Operation Eggs Over Easy was to follow the Black Ops tradition of MK Ultra and Operation Paperclip. Berkeley coffee-house intellectuals Jack O'Hara and Austin de Lone were recruited and flown to London to infiltrate the "underground scene" by posing as a country rock act, reporting back through CIA agents embedded in the American Embassy, which paid for the band to tour universities in the UK (seen as hotspots of radical politics). The Agency also provided a base for the band - a house in London's leafy Kentish Town, wired for audio and video surveillance. "There were like wires and cameras on the fucking walls, all over the house," laughs Graham Parker today. "We were too stoned to give a fuck. I remember Nick [Lowe - Ed.] making faces and fart noises for the cameras. Happy times!"

Operation Eggs Over Easy's stroke of strategic brilliance lay in establishing a network of public houses as music venues; chat flowed as freely as beer at the gigs, giving the CIA a unique source of street-level data, soon winging its way back to Langley via the band's "cultural sponsors" the American Embassy.

The year-long operation complete, the band headed back to the USA, where it showed its street cred by supporting headliners such as The Eagles and Yes on stadium tours. They recorded a couple of pleasant, laid-back country-rock albums as tax write-offs (both mysteriously "vanishing" after zero promotion) which sound little like the bands that sprang from the lively London pub scene the CIA created.

CIA Chief "Uncle Dick" Helms [at left, left - Ed.]  feels up war criminal Henry Kissinger at London Embassy reception for band. "You like that, bubeleh?"

CIA's Alma Street "safe house" in London's leafy Kentish Town, where band entertain political subversives such as Nick Lowe (the CIA's role in failed US launch of Brinsley Schwartz is currently being researched) and Barry Richardson out of Bees Make Honey.

Revolutionary Socialist Student Federation meeting at Tally Ho public house in London's leafy Kentish Town, where Eggs Over Easy are house band. Jack O'Hara center left.

Band practice at Walter Annenburg (then US Ambassador) town house in London's leafy Belgravia. Note costly medieval tapestries, "hippie" toupées.

Both O'Hara and de Lone were contacted during research for this piece; both declined to comment.